Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c12.62

c12.62

Apart from specifically Indian animals, such as elephants and water-buffaloes, the most interesting feature which differentiates the Harappā assemblage of domesticated beasts from those of other Western Asiatic prehistoric sites is the presence there of the horse and the camel. Ox, goat, sheep, pig, and dog are the familiar domesticated animals of the Old World wherever the adoption of agricultural economies takes over from the hunting stage of human culture – the dog indeed, as we have seen, was domesticated even earlier. But the origin of the camel is an enigma among the beasts of burden and of transport in the Ancient Orient, and the horse is at least not an original inhabitant of Mesopotamia, but is given the significant Sumerian name of the ‘ass of the mountains’ when it first appears, probably in Jemdet Nasr times. It was presumably imported from ‘the mountains’ of Highland Persia or Turkestan, which with Baluchistan formed a common geographical province within which the earliest evidence of horse-taming comes.